Year 2012 {Baby Book & Journal Filler}

Welcome to the year 2012!

Below you will find the list I compiled of major events, trends, world leaders, cost of living, and popular culture for the year 2012. I hope this helps you with the baby book or commemorative project you’re working on. If you don’t want to write down all this information, take a look at the printable versions.

(request any printable color changes in comments section below).

Affiliate links have been incorporated into this post to provide you with further information about trends and popular items during this period of time.

2012 World Population:

(prb.org)
7,057,075,000 and counting…

2012 World Leaders:

Barack Obama, President of the United States
Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Joachim Gauck, President of Germany
Hu Jintao, President of China
Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of Russia
David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Pope Benedict XVI of Vatican City
Francois Hollande, President of France
Hillary Clinton, United States Secretary of State
Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations

2012 Major Events:

(Wikipedia)
Leap Year
There are many popular beliefs about the year 2012. These beliefs range from the spiritually transformative to the apocalyptic, and center upon various contemporary interpretations of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.February 6 – The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II marks the 60th anniversary of her accession to the thrones of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the 60th anniversary of her becoming Head of the Commonwealth.March 13 – After 244 years since its first publication, the Encyclopædia Britannica discontinues its print edition.May 22 – Tokyo Skytree, the tallest self-supporting tower in the world at 634 metres high, is opened to public.June 5–6 – The century’s second and last solar transit of Venus occurs. The next pair are predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125.July 20 – James Holmes enters an Aurora, CO theater and opens fire during ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ opening night, killing 12 people and injuring 58 more.July 27 – August 12 – The 2012 Summer Olympics are held in London.August 6–20 – Mars Science Laboratory, also known as the Curiosity rover, successfully lands on Mars.August 12 – The 2012 World Expo ends.August 31 – Researchers successfully perform the first implantation of an early prototype bionic eye with 24 electrodes.
– Armenia severs diplomatic relations with Hungary, following the extradition to Azerbaijan and subsequent pardoning of Ramil Safarov, who was convicted of killing an Armenian soldier in Hungary in 2004. The move is also met with fierce criticism from other countries.September 7 – Canada officially cuts diplomatic ties with Iran by closing its embassy in Tehran and ordered the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from Ottawa, over support for Syria, nuclear plans and human rights abuses.September 11 – 27 – A series of terrorist attacks are directed against United States diplomatic missions worldwide, as well as diplomatic missions of Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In the US, opinions are divided over whether the attacks are a reaction to a YouTube trailer for the film Innocence of Muslims. In Libya, among the dead is US ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.October 24 – 30 – Hurricane Sandy kills at least 209 people in the Caribbean, Bahamas, United States and Canada. Considerable storm surge damage causes major disruption to the eastern seaboard of the United States.November 6 – President Barack Obama wins the United States presidential election and remains in office for second term.December 14 – Adam Lanza, 20, enters Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and opens fire killing 20 children and 6 adult staff members, then himself. Incident opens up debate about gun laws in the United States.December 20 – The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, notably used by the pre-Columbian Mayan civilization among others, completes a “great cycle” of thirteen b’ak’tuns (periods of 144,000 days each) since the mythical creation date of the calendar’s current era.

2012 U.S. Economy:

December 24 – NPR.org “The 2012 Economy Brought Glad Tidings To Many”
After years of recession and slow recovery, maybe you didn’t notice. But it turns out, 2012 was a fairly good year for the U.S. economy.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has risen nearly 14 percent this year and the unemployment rate has fallen to 7.7 percent, the lowest point in four years. Inflation and interest rates have stayed low, allowing families to cut their debt loads.
“Consumers are feeling better now,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm. Compared with December 2007, when the Great Recession was just starting, “the burdens on consumers have eased quite a bit,” he said.
Final data aren’t in yet for the full year, but in the period from July through September, U.S. household net worth rose by 2.7 percent compared with the previous three months, according to the Federal Reserve. Combined with overall economic growth of 3.1 percent in that same period, the pace of improvement — both for individuals and corporations — could be described as decent, though far from robust. Read more…

2012 Pop Culture:

February 11 -Whitney Houston, 48, dies suddenly in Beverly Hills, CA while taking a bath.May 18 – Facebook became a publicly traded company.
-Former Penn State assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky found guilty in child sex abuse trial.
-After nearly six years of marriage Katie Holmes files for divorce from Tom Cruise seeking primary custody of their daughter Suri.
-Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries end their 72-day marriage after a wedding special on E!.
-Howard Stern joins America’s Got Talent television show.November -The fifth and final Twilight movie debuts.
-Disney buys Lucasfilm set to release StarWars Episode VII in 2014.
-Katie Couric hosts new talk show fall 2012.
-Pippa Middleton set to release her book for the 2012 holiday season.December 3 – Will and Kate announce royal pregnancy.

2012 Top Science Breakthroughs:

(Wikipedia)June 5–6– The century’s second and last solar transit of Venus occurs. The next pair are predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125June 24 – Shenzhou 9, a Chinese spacecraft carrying three Chinese astronauts, including the first-ever female one, docked manually with an orbiting module Tiangong 1, first time as the country, making them as the third country, after the United States and Russia, to successfully perform the mission.
Lonesome George, the last known individual of the Pinta Island Tortoise subspecies, dies at a Galapagos National Park, thus making the subspecies extinct.July 4– CERN announces the discovery of a new particle with properties consistent with the Higgs boson after experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
Pleiades, a proposed supercomputer built by Intel and SGI for NASA’s Ames Research Center, will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10 quadrillion floating point operations per second).
On the Sun, the solar maximum of Solar Cycle 24 in the 11-year sunspot cycle is forecast to occur. Solar Cycle 24 is regarded to have commenced January 2008, and on average will reach its peak of maximal sunspot activity around 2012.August 6 – Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory mission’s rover, successfully lands on Mars.

16 thoughts on “Year 2012 {Baby Book & Journal Filler}”

I am SO grateful to have found your blog!!! I am super excited to have such a wide array of facts (fun and historical) in one place to do my children’s baby books!!! Thank you soooo much for all you do. Us moms really appreciate it!
I will definitely be returning to your website for the rest of my kids! 😀👍

How thoughtful of you to share this information! I know each of us should be able to research it ourselves, but it is so kind of you to post it. Finally, I will complete those pages in my older childrens’ baby books because I had never devoted the time. Thanks again!!!

Can you try to find the average cost of diapers for 2012 and 2013??? My baby book is asking for it……great job by the way, I love it, I got most of the info I was looking for, for my nieces and nephew’s book

Hi Vanessa! Even though I updated it in 2013 all the information and events posted for 2012 happened in 2012. I’ll have to do this for 2013 too because the year is not over yet. Does that make sense? 🙂